Do you know if a Cartographic Representation (CR) can be created that would give you the same visual result as a 'Dissolve'? The result would be the visual removal of the interior lines between polygons that have the same value in a particular attribute. At this time, we are carrying and maintaining 2 -3 extra feature classes in our production DB that contain different dissolves for use in carto products. Having a CR that would do the same would make our data maintenance life easier.

Mapping Center Answer:

Alas, this will need to remain a data editing issue, and can't really be reproduced with only symbology. The main problem to overcome is the definition of the new geometry from which cartographic representations will be drawn - you still end up having to create some type of dissolve or merge. There are a couple of ways you can make "reps" invisible or un-drawn, for example to remove internal polygon boundaries, but they will likely require as much data manipulation or editing as creating a new 'dissolved' dataset.

Polygons are particularly difficult to solve for this problem. Line types are a bit easier to symbolize as a group as they've got no internal boundaries. In which case you could create any number of additional feature class representations with unique rules based on various dissolve criteria.